


Peak

by stardust_made



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-06
Packaged: 2017-11-28 10:03:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor feels the loss of Donna Noble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peak

**Author's Note:**

> I have rarely connected to a show as much as I did during the S4 of new Doctor Who. I thought that Donna Noble was the best thing since sliced bread, and that the chemistry between Catherine Tate and David Tennant was/is, if you pardon the pun, out of this world. I read many a wonderful fic back in the day when I was still a shy lurker with no LJ account, so I wrote this in 2011 as a 'thank you' to all the marvellous authors and everyone at the [](http://doctor_donna.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://doctor_donna.livejournal.com/)**doctor_donna** Livejournal community. 
> 
> Originally posted [over here](http://stardust-made.livejournal.com/18416.html) at LJ.

 

Everything existed together and everything passed. He knew that. This would pass too.  
  
He had seen humans hurt; he had listened to them talk about it, sing about it, cry. He had made them hurt. But he didn’t hurt like them.   
  
He felt. Some feelings had a peak, _that_ he felt—it was fixed, like an event. And in the peak, he experienced every single instance leading to it. The all-consuming sense of loss accompanied by the millions of instances of connection and closeness that were blossoming into the pain at the end. Love was the bud of the loss, growing and unrolling its petals like the very heart of creation. In the peak, he could feel both: bud and blossom, past and present.   
  
And he could also feel the ripples of the loss ahead, every instance when it would pierce him, the pain sharp like the erashnia of the Mhoam-ba-ay Cruul. As well as every instance in which the loss would whisper in his hearts with the paleness of the barest memory. Everything that feeling would produce, in the vast stretch of what humans called ‘the future’—and what he only knew as _then_. Withering petals, falling petals. Until there were no petals. The blossom dead, the feeling of loss all but diminished.   
  
This was how a Time Lord felt: a boundless vortex of all the instances that had made the feeling possible and all the instances spinning from it. Coalescing into that peak; the feeling illuminating its own time-line.   
  
He had tried to explain to Donna once that everything in the Universe had a time-line, including feelings. She looked at him with that serious expression of hers and tried to get her head around it. Then she spoke, careful.“Is that how you feel—all of it at once?”   
  
“Sometimes,” he'd said.  
  
She contemplated, eyes resting on his face.  
  
“That must be quite a lot to feel.”  
  
“I’m not human, Donna.”  
  
She smiled at him.  
  
“Yeah, I know _that_ , Spaceman,”—her eyes remained serious—“but a feeling is a feeling. If you know to call it a feeling, then you know what a feeling is.”  
  
He smiled back at her fondly.   
  
“Donna Noble—philosopher: 'On the Time Lords'.” He grinned further while using the air-quotes.  
  
She looked at him again, and suddenly he hadn’t been able to read her face. Nor her reply. Not at the time.  
  
“I know just the one. Donna Noble—philosopher: 'On this Time Lord'.”  
  
***  
  
Before they left for Shan Shen, she'd asked him: “Doctor, that thing about the time-lines of feelings…When does it—I mean, does it happen to you with every feeling?”  
  
“Only with the really strong ones. At the moment of their peak, it sort of all…erupts together.”  
  
She hesitated.   
  
“Why do you ask?” He had tried to help her.  
  
She had been so close, her lips had opened—  
  
“Nothing.” She'd shaken her head, then beamed. “Come on! Alien bargains!”  
  
 _Yes, Donna_ , he’d wanted to tell her. _I’m sure I’ll feel it with you_.  
  
And now he was—only when it was too late to share it with her. It was _a lot_ to feel but he relished it. Because in the peak, he could also feel the pain not being part of him one day. And for a moment he didn’t want that day to come; he wanted to stay in the peak and be drenched in the now of his loss of Donna Noble.


End file.
